I have a very odd problem that didn't happen in Mint 5. I'm running a Thinkpad T61p with Windows XP on the main internal hard drive and Mint 6 on a hard drive in the media bay (where the DVD drive normally would go or the alternate extra battery). For installation, I took out the Windows XP drive and put in its place (internal location) the drive that I normally run Mint on using the media bay. I then installed Mint on the drive, removed it, and returned it to the media bay adapter.

To boot, during startup I press the blue Thinkvantage button and choose an alternate boot device (the drive in the media bay). This way I can completely remove the Linux drive if needed and it leaves my Windows XP install completely untouched for the non-Linux people in my office to work on.

In Mint 5, this all worked great. In Mint 6, I have the following perplexing behavior:

1. If I boot with the Windows XP drive removed and the Mint 6 drive in the media bay, Mint boots just fine2. If I boot with the Mint 6 hard drive in the internal location, Mint boots just fine3. If I boot with the Windows XP drive in it's internal location (where it should be normally), and boot using the media bay drive instead (Mint 6), I get this nasty error:

I have tried reinstalling udev at the suggestion of other postings on the 'net with no success. It reinstalls but the problem persists, but only if I leave the Windows hard drive in the internal drive bay. All I have to do to get Mint to boot out of the media bay is to remove that Windows hard drive.

Is there a fstab parameter that needs modification or something? I can work by removing the Windows hard drive temporarily every time I need to run Linux, but that's a pain. The most frustrating part is that it used to work. I'd install with all the drives in place using an external CD drive, but that axes my Windows MBR and won't ever boot without that Linux hard drive in the media bay. Not practical for the times I'd like to run Windows with the DVD drive in the media bay.

Any suggestions would be welcome and greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Then, note the UUID for the hard drive that I want to boot for Linux. Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file so that the UUID is specified rather than a device name, which apparently is incorrect in my somewhat unconventional setup. It should look similar to this:

After reading the difficulties with using UUID, I changed my menu.lst to use /dev/sdb1 and all is well, so long as there's a drive in the internal bay so that my Linux drive gets enumerated as sdb1.

Thanks for the link - hadn't had any luck finding that before. I'm coming from a different distro and didn't know the ropes concerning where I should look for help prior to posting on the forums. Apologies for my ignorance.